


a pleasure to burn

by SyntheticRevenge



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Mentions of Cancer, Mommy Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25158724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyntheticRevenge/pseuds/SyntheticRevenge
Summary: Gerry hides books about friends saving the world from darkness under his bed. His mum can’t know about them. They are the darkness, and it sort of seems like no one’s going to come stop them anytime soon. He likes the books, though. Seems like it would be nice to stand against something other than the entire world.(Gerry, through the years)
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Gertrude Robinson, Gerard Keay & Mary Keay
Comments: 6
Kudos: 41





	a pleasure to burn

**Author's Note:**

> I have been drowning in my Gerry feelings lately and I had to get them out Somehow. It didn't turn out quite how I wanted, but I like it anyway. Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> (Title from Fahrenheit 451)

9.

Gerard sits crosslegged on the floor in the closed, dark bookstore, between the stacks, an open book written in some ancient dead language resting on his thighs. He should know what the language is. Sanskrit, maybe, or Babylonian, or Akkadian, they all look the same to him, and he’s  _ tired _ besides, but his mum’s gone and he knows when she gets back she’ll wake him up anyway, so there’s no point sleeping.

He hasn’t looked down at the book in at least an hour, he’s staring towards the window, watching people pass on the street, lovers and friends and  _ poor unfortunates who can’t see this world for what it really is _ , like his mum says. Still, Gerard thinks it would be nice to have friends, or at least talk to people who don’t know the name Jurgen Leitner and have never heard the word  _ entities _ .

He hides books about friends saving the world from darkness under his bed. His mum can’t know about them. They  _ are _ the darkness, and it sort of seems like no one’s going to come stop them anytime soon. He likes the books, though. Seems like it would be nice to stand against something other than the entire world.

The friends in the books all call each other nicknames. It’s a level of fondness that makes Gerard’s heart hurt. He thinks he’d want to be called Gerry. It’s casual, friendly, untainted by his mother spitting it like a swear. 

He barely keeps himself awake until she gets back, ranting about  _ the Eye needs to play by the fucking rules, high and mighty-- _ and he listens, patiently, nods along. She sighs and scowls at him when she’s finished, picks the book up off his legs and puts it back on the shelf, waves him to bed.

_ Goodnight, Gerard _ . Flat. The mothers in Gerard’s books are always sweet, ebullient, so worried about their daring, heroic sons. Someday, he’s going to make her so proud that she’s going to sound like that.

13.

Gerry twists his hand into the straps of his backpack, resting on his lap. He watches people over the top of it, and it’s all suddenly overwhelming, like by leaving Pinhole Books and his mum willingly-- _ willfully _ \--he’s taken some protective filter off reality. 

It exhausts him, makes his head throb. The people on the Tube are  _ loud _ and  _ vapid  _ and so completely unaware of everything that’s out to get them. They talk about trying skydiving as if the Vast couldn’t swallow them and leave them falling forever, or having a campfire like the Desolation couldn’t take them down  _ screaming _ , or--everything is dangerous and they just don’t fucking  _ know _ .

They should know. But, like his mum says,  _ if they knew, they might  _ do _ something about it, Gerard. _ Her annoyance rises every time he asks about normal people, about how they deal with all this.  _ You and I have to know how to handle the Entities because we’re on their side, they would regret killing us. The fucking ignorants don’t matter, Gerard, what is your  _ obsession _. _

His obsession is still with--with maybe being the hero in a pleasant, not-evil book. Being the darkness gets old. Getting shouted at and gripped tightly until he shuts up gets old. 

“You shouldn’t go skydiving,” he blurts, eventually, at the people sitting across from him. They give him truly skeptical looks, and he struggles for a reason that isn’t...well, the  _ truth _ . “I--um. It’s dangerous. People die. Or--or worse.”

He flushes with embarrassment as one of them snorts and dismisses him with an eyeroll, turning back to the other. He gets off at the next stop and doesn’t even leave the station, just heads back to Morden. Tries not to think about the way his mother will  _ laugh _ when he comes back not even two hours after storming out.

Someday he’ll manage it. Someday, the brightness of the world as it’s supposed to be will get less overwhelming, and he won’t be part of the darkness waiting to eat it whole anymore. Maybe.

16.

So Gerry’s part of the darkness. So what? These things happen. He might as well lean into it, might as well dress and act the part. Stop kicking so hard against the only path he’s ever been on. 

He’s serving something beyond him. Higher powers. That’s a worthy cause, isn’t it, devoting yourself to the only gods you know exist? It’s more fun if he tells himself he’s doing it for them, if when he’s chasing down cursed, evil books he pretends it’s for a real reason. So he can’t be the hero in this cosmic struggle, fine, he’ll at least be a damn compelling villain.

The clincher in his character arc is probably the fact that he doesn’t give a shit about the entities, and that his reasons all crumble if he thinks directly at them for more than a few minutes. 

He’s bleeding from holes in his legs where he was bitten by rats that were definitely Corruption-touched and probably plague carriers, and his vision is pulsing and fading and the universe is tilting hard to the left and he probably looks like one of those sad Goth wastecases too fucked up to stand, holding himself up on the Tube door, Leitner clutched to his chest, trying to remember how to swallow as the Corruption oozes through his veins.

That’s a mark, for sure. Maybe his mum’ll be proud. His vision streaks, and his arteries pulse warmth and fly-humming music, heart beating  _ give in _ .

He’s not a fucking pussy, and he’s never liked the Corruption. He barely makes it home, manages to stagger across an entire street by accident without getting hit, and when he finally unlocks the door with leaden hands, his mum’s face lights up, near-shining with joy in his blurred vision. 

She glows, sometimes, with passion, for her work, for the great evils of the world, and Gerry has always desperately wondered what it would be like if she turned that glow on him. For a moment, he feels it, warm and bright and loved, and he sort of braces for a hug, a hand on his cheek, anything remotely maternal.

She pulls the book out of his arms, and, like she cut the strings holding him up, Gerry collapses on the floor, convulsing slightly.

“Well done, Gerard,” she says, less tightly than usual, and then that buzzing, humming, insect-wing-beating song swallows his mind.

19.

The highest power Mary Keay serves is herself, and Gerry really should have realized that sooner. He was an idiot kid, wrapped up in a one-man cult of personality and a blanket of deepseated mommy issues that he should probably get therapy for, but he’s done with that. It’s bullshit.

She’s a murderer, and a liar, and she will never,  _ ever _ have any control over the gods she’s playing with. She’s just a fucking person, and a bad one to boot. Gerry’s sure he’s a bad person too, but that’s neither here nor there, because he at least knows how to shut his mind up enough to live with himself. Living with  _ her _ is something else entirely. He’s never learned to block her out.

So he tells her he’s done. That he doesn’t want to do this anymore, doesn’t want to throw himself repeatedly into the volcano of fear and danger and darkness that will be the Keay legacy. It comes out a little less eloquent than that, though, his exact words are more like “You’re completely delusional and definitely evil and I’m not going to be your bitch anymore”, which does still get the message across.

She slaps him, which he expected, and then crosses her arms and makes a profoundly annoyed face, like  _ look what you made me do, Gerard _ . He rubs his jaw, and they both sigh in unison, already somehow exhausted by this confrontation. 

“So what are you going to do, then?” she asks, finally, arms still crossed, and he blinks, because it’s a pretty good question.

“Not this,” Gerry says, shrugging. “I’ll figure it out.”

“This is like when you used to run away,” she says, and sighs again. “You’re spineless, Gerard, you’ll be back.”

“Fuck you,” he says, laughing, and he just laughs harder when the second, inevitable slap comes. “No, really. Fuck you.”

“I’d be careful, Gerard, I’m not one to play around with,” she says, lightly, and his laughter freezes in his chest.

“What, you’d kill me like you killed dad?” he asks. She raises her chin to the challenge, gaze steely, and shrugs, slowly, exaggeratedly.

“He stopped being useful.”

At least she finally admits it. It feels like a heavy punch to the gut even though deep down he’s always known. “You’re a monster,” he says, and it’s a very obvious thing to say, but he can’t find anything else.

“What does that make you?” she asks. He doesn't have an answer.

21.

When he burns his first Leitner, he mutters a ‘fuck you, mum’ into the flames and drops the book on the ground. A smile twitches across his face despite himself, cigarette burning between his fingers. 

Ray Bradbury was right. It  _ was _ a pleasure to burn, and he’s starting to get why the Desolation has an entire cult of followers. Righteous destruction, cleansing fire, it’s--yeah. It’s something. He’s not about to join the Lightless Flame, or anything, because he’s a capital G Good Guy now, an antihero, the fucked-up lighter-happy Goth who swoops in and saves the day.

It’s pretty sexy of him, he thinks. He’s making up for a lifetime of misguided actions, for the things he did on his mother’s leash, and it’s good to be free. It’s good to breathe, even if he’s just breathing smoke and carbon monoxide. Let his lungs constrict and shrivel and die, at least he’s not beholden to anyone.

He tried to have a normal life, for a bit. Got a job in a regular, not-spooky bookstore (though he may have made it spooky by accident), dated a regular, not-spooky guy for a bit, etc, but it just wasn’t right. He wasn’t raised to be content with the way the world is on the surface, and he saw his old gods lurking everywhere around him.

They called it a nervous breakdown when the Spiral started fucking around with him for sport. He called it a cruel joke, but secretly, he was sort of relieved. It was like the entities were giving him permission to bite back, so he dug his teeth in and pulled hard.

Let anyone try to stop him. He’s getting pretty fucking good with knives and lighters and aerosol cans, and he’s not really afraid of anything anymore.

Well, anything except his mother. He’s not an idiot.

23.

He visits once every few weeks, because it wouldn’t be right to cut his mum off completely, because some sick part of him does still love her, wants her to be proud or angry or  _ something _ . Mostly she’s still completely indifferent, but they’ve actually started talking like  _ people _ on occasion, which is almost nice.

Except, one evening, he goes to visit her, and she’s dying on the floor. There are pieces of her skin hung around, drying, covered in Sanskrit, and his mouth floods with saliva. She’s finally destroying herself. He can’t breathe. Can’t move.

Her words become formless static in his mind, but he knows she’s asking him to help her. To finish what she started, to bind her to that unthinkable horrorshow of a book, the worst abomination he’s ever encountered in his lifetime of encountering abominations. She wants control. She wants to be another fucking nightmare to add to the collection.

She’s slow-moving, bleeding, eyes unfocused from pain and painkillers, and he has an impulse to help, to pick her up and take her to a hospital, because she’s still his mother and he’s not going to let her die without ever receiving the love she so desperately fucking owes him.

And yes, because he loves her, because she’s the one cosmic horror he’s never had a chance of laughing in the face of, because she’s always owned him mind and soul, no matter what he tells himself.

He can’t breathe. He swallows hard, her words still numb, underwater, staticky in his ears.

He leaves her there. He doesn’t go back to Pinhole Books. When they arrest him, he doesn’t fight back. Can’t explain what really happened, because he doesn’t really want to be committed, would rather just die in prison.

It’s humiliating that she has to save him, even now that she’s dead. She makes sure he knows just how humiliating it is.

25.

Mary won’t leave him alone. He’s stopped calling her ‘mum’ in the years since she died, even ‘mother’ is too familial. She’s torturing him for sport, her blame digging white-hot talons into him day and night. She mocks him, taunts him, feeds him streams of misinformation he occasionally makes the mistake of listening to.

He drinks. A lot. It doesn’t drown her out, but it at least makes her easier to deal with. Makes it so he can at least laugh, numbly, distantly, at the complete absurdity of the situation. And fuck, maybe she’s right, maybe if he’d helped her, she wouldn’t have turned out  _ wrong _ , and he’d be able to sleep without heavily sedating himself.

She’s not always there. She blinks out of existence sometimes, and sometimes she’s just fucking around with the supernatural like always, playing with her new, warped immortality. Those brief respites are  _ bliss _ , oases in the middle of the hell-desert his life has become. Sometimes, he goes Leitner-burning, which honestly never gets less satisfying, especially now that he’s always got a flask on him to really get the fire going.

Sometimes, he tries to escape, but it’s like when he was a kid. He can’t ever get too far away. They always find him, whether it’s a woman marked by the Lonely in Italy, or an out-of-place door in a shitty hotel in Prague. It’s a sick, cosmic joke, to be claimed by nothing but caught by everything. Maybe that’s what Mary wanted, a family line inextricably and painfully tied to the unknown, no matter how hard they fight it.

He kills someone for the first time in London. He thinks they were an avatar, but he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t ever want to. He couldn’t live with being wrong, and he can’t die, because Mary would just put him in the fucking book. 

He asked her once if she could communicate with the other people bound to the book. She just laughed, told him his father was already gone. She still reads him like a very sad, gin-soaked Leitner.

Fuck, he hates her.

28.

Gertrude saves him from Mary, and he doesn’t even care that she’s Eye-aligned and completely apathetic to death and misery, he is so grateful that he would do just about anything for her. He can sleep again. It doesn’t make him any less exhausted, but, well, that’s his life now, he guesses.

She’s keen on fire, which Gerry respects and admires, and they work well together. A good blend of pure knowledge (thank you, Ceaseless Watcher) and Supernatural Street Smarts (thanks, Mary). 

They mostly deal with the Stranger. Gerry’s always hated the Stranger, and yeah, he hates all of them, but the Stranger makes his spine shudder, the thought of loving someone without realizing they’ve been replaced--not that Gerry’s ever had anyone to lose like that. 

He tattoos eyes all over himself, allowing the Eye full access to him. It’s the least he can do in exchange for his freedom, and really, he doesn’t mind it too much. The Eye is passive, patient, considering. Not very fun, but not very threatening, and that’s a good blend for him.

He and Gertrude start travelling, seemingly endlessly, and the real world, as always, gives him a headache, a pressure in his brain that won’t lift. Sometimes he wakes up nauseous from it, dizzy, unfocused, but Gertrude doesn’t have any patience for that, so he slams the strongest painkillers he can function on and swallows it all down.

Sometimes, she gives him sad looks, and he wishes he were more aligned with the Eye so he could understand why. Mostly, she treats him like Mary treated him when he was a kid: distant, sharp-edged--but with an occasional hint of genuine fondness. He finds himself jonesing for those softer moments like he’s fifteen again.

At least he’s the good guy, this time. At least they’re saving the world. He’s finally making everything right.

29.

His thoughts are subway cars that keep splitting apart and crashing into each other and knocking themselves off the track and through the stations and his body is so numb he doesn’t know what’s happening to it and he can’t form words to beg for reassurance or death or help or his mother.

There is one simple thought he can hang onto, one cold certainty: the--the woman he followed, the one that isn’t his mother but that he sometimes wished was, her name, it’s gone and he can’t find it--she knew. She knows. She stares through him and sees the thing growing in his brain and she could’ve told him and she didn’t.

He starts to think he hates her, but then he remembers, distantly, dimly, that he chose this. He chose to trust someone who cares for no one,  _ again _ , and believed he was the exception,  _ again _ . 

Knowing he’s dying and there’s nothing to be done isn’t the relief he always sort of thought it might be. Instead, cold fear is sinking into him, Terminus claiming what belongs to it, that last, slow trickle of terror everyone feels.

He wonders if his mother felt like this when he left her part-flayed on the floor. If some part of her didn’t believe she’d be remotely successful, if she thought she was actually dying for good. Maybe she felt it when her page was destroyed. He hates the thought of inflicting this on someone else--on her, on the people he’s killed.

He can’t remember his mother’s name, or the cold woman’s name, or even his own name--Gerry, but--but that wasn’t all of it, was it, that was--but he remembers the names of his former, cruel gods, each and every one.

His mother would be proud. 

He almost laughs at that, but it gets caught and mangled in his numb throat and comes out raw and twisted. Another frigid wave of fear. It’s coming, any second, he knows it is, and he at least hopes that this will be it. That he’ll close his eyes and it’ll all be over, that maybe there’s something peaceful beyond, that he’ll be able to meet his father and lay in the sun and finally be fucking free of all of this.

His heart pounds in fear, and then it doesn’t beat anymore.

The End.

?.

The End is never the End is never the--because life is a fucking nightmare and why would death be any different, why would Gerry be able to escape the skin book that everyone in his family’s been bound into, why would he expect any better of Gertrude Robinson, the woman who fed a man who trusted her to the Spiral, the woman who--

Existing like this hurts, every moment aches, every single second spent knowing that he isn’t  _ really _ Gerry, even though he is, and if he isn’t really Gerry then why does he feel? What  _ is _ he? When will he finally be able to just get some goddamned peace and quiet and  _ rest _ ?

It’s not as if he would’ve minded being the mentor figure to some young anti-entity punk like himself, the Goth Kenobi to some bright-eyed Skywalker, but not like this, not spouting exposition to two asshole Hunt avatars who just use him to feed their master.

He wishes they would die, preferably in a huge fire that also destroys his book, and then everyone would be happy and/or dead. But no. Existence stretches on, stuck in that paralytic void between life and death. 

At least he’s not afraid.

?.

There is the click of a lighter, and his prison ignites, and if he could laugh without a body he would. 

It was a pleasure to burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, all feedback is appreciated!  
> I'm on tumblr @witnesstotheend.  
> also, shameless self-promo, but if you would like to read Less depressing Gerry content by me, he's a fun bitchy ghost in my fic Stale Air <3


End file.
